5 Ways to Nail Your Digital Video Advertising Strategy

According to eMarketer, digital video ad spending topped $10 billion in 2016 and is on track to approach $18 billion by 2020. This anticipated growth shows that video is a popular medium among marketers. But, it’s still somewhat of a new frontier.

Issues like ad blocking and fraud complicate the space, and marketers are still working to keep up with this quickly-evolving industry and develop their play books for success.

Luckily, some initial best practices have emerged. Use these tips below to shape your digital video advertising strategy:

1) Personalize Your Ads

Consumers have high expectations when it comes to advertising. It must entertain and inform, as they’ll tune out content that doesn’t resonate. To make videos relevant to the consumer, you need information about the viewer you’re trying to engage. When it comes to collecting the data, just ask.

Use your content to start a two-way dialogue with consumers by placing surveys at the end of your video. Use these surveys to gather insight on behavioral and attitudinal signals. Ask questions to vet sentiment, brand perception, and purchase intent. Segment and qualify viewers based on their responses. Then, tailor the content you serve accordingly.

2) Be Authentic

To achieve authenticity, embrace the spontaneity of live video and collaborate with influencers to bring an element of accessibility to your videos. It’s also important to create opportunities for consumers to participate through hashtags, social engagement (retweets, comments), or user-generated content (UCG.)

3) Think Beyond Views and Impressions

Video used to be seen as simply an awareness tactic. Now, you can create content that maps to the entire customer journey to achieve lower-funnel metrics.

With ViralGains, marketers guide their users through each step of the buyer journey by placing Engagement Cards at the end of videos. Brands use Engagement Cards to capture email addresses, drive visits to relevant landing pages, or even to increase awareness by showing additional content in a video carousel.

Using these tactics, marketers are able to tie their video campaigns to the metrics than drive the business as a whole–including sales.

4) Don’t Just Re-Purpose TV Ads

There are often silos between creative, strategy, and media activation teams. The result is a less-than-ideal user experience: Shortened TV ads on digital, long-form content in auto-play ad units, and calls-to-action for desktop actions that don’t work all that great on mobile.

To avoid these mistakes, think holistically. Consider the audience, device, and ad format for campaigns from the very beginning. Most of all, keep the viewer experience top-of-mind when creating your digital video advertising strategy.

5) Reconsider the 30-second Spot

30 seconds is no longer the standard. Snapchat’s 10-second videos and Instagram’s 15-second spots are highly popular short-form content. On the other hand, the average length of ads on the YouTube Ads Leaderboard in 2014 were three minutes—47% longer than the previous year’s top video ads. At ViralGains, we’ve seen strong video engagement for videos as short as 15 seconds and as long as 32 minutes.

Consumers respond to good, relevant videos—no matter the length. Rather than fixating on length, focus on developing compelling stories for your target audience.

With these best practices in mind, you can capitalize on the opportunity to connect with a growing digital video viewership, build a customer journey with video, and create real business value from your digital video advertising.

What digital video advertising tips do you have? Let us know in the comments.